


An Unexpected Life

by enchantedsleeper



Category: Questionable Content (Webcomic)
Genre: Appearances by Mr. Smooches and Azathoth, Fluff, Futurefic, Mentions of Elliot/Brun/Clinton, Other, Queerplatonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 02:21:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21839923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enchantedsleeper/pseuds/enchantedsleeper
Summary: A year on from her decision to quit the police force, Roko looks back over some of the weird turns her life has taken.Of course, it could always stand to be abitweirder.
Relationships: Roko Basilisk & Spookybot | Yay Newfriend
Comments: 11
Kudos: 43
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	An Unexpected Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vass/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, dear vass! I hope you enjoy this bit of fluffiness :3 I love Roko and Yay's friendship in the comic, so it was really fun to dig into it a bit more for this fic and imagine what things might look like for Roko - and her relationship with Yay - a bit further down the line. I also enjoyed fleshing out the world of AI rights a little bit! I even snuck one of my favourite poly ships (Elliot/Brun/Clinton) into the background xD
> 
> Elliot doesn't have a surname in canon, so I made one up - his full name in this fic is Elliot Price.
> 
> Also, I'm tragically British, so I apologise in advance for any rogue UK English that might appear in the narration. I tried to watch out for it as much as I could!

On the one-year anniversary of her decision to quit the police force, Roko throws a party.

She doesn’t tell anyone what it’s for, though she thinks that most of them have probably guessed. “Oh! That’s right, it’s been almost a year since you started here, hasn’t it?” Beepatrice says when Roko invites her and Nelson. Bubbles smiles gently and promises that she and Faye will be there. May squints at her suspiciously, before saying, “Eh, whatever. I’ll probably make it.” Elliot asks her if he can bring his two partners, Brun and Clinton.

Melon, of course, turns up three days early. Twice.

It’s nice, seeing her apartment full of so many people. Roko has never hosted a party before - she was friends with some of her colleagues on the force, particularly O'Malley, but spending much time with them outside a few after-work drinks would have felt a bit odd. Outside of work… well. With the exception of Melon, who has been an endearing, oddball presence in Roko’s life ever since she moved into her apartment, Roko has never had any close friends there either. Or even not-so-close friends. The life of a career cop can be weirdly solitary.

Before her… accident, she’d been trying to get back out there a bit, dip a toe into the AI dating waters, but the results were predictably disastrous. She's not even sure if she was looking for romance or just a connection with someone. (Or a shared… interest… in bread).

Now, though, she has connections she could never even have imagined. Such as to the former combat AI turned illegal fighting ring employee turned freelance welder who she’s currently chatting to in a corner of the kitchen.

“And your connection to your upgraded chassis is still… improving?” Bubbles asks her with characteristic delicacy.

Roko smiles, and it’s a little strained, but she doesn’t mind Bubbles asking. “Yeah, mostly. It’s still touch and go, sometimes, but I have whole weeks now in between an episode. And I’m better at dealing with them.”

Bubbles frowns. “That still does not sound ideal.”

Roko says nothing for a moment, watching May urging Beepatrice to downcycle her processors, Nelson inexplicably perched on her shoulders.

“Apologies, if I-” Bubbles begins. Roko shakes her head.

“It’s fine. It’s not… ideal, no, but I’m dealing with it. I learned a while back to take it one day at a time. I might never be as integrated with this body as I was with my old one, but…”

She trails off. It’s still hard for her to talk about the accident in any kind of positive terms - there’s no silver lining to body dysphoria and regular dissociative episodes. Roko has learned that most people - humans and AIs both - expect you to package up an unpleasant experience for them, presenting it as some kind of lesson learned or “it could have been worse” to make them feel better. When you don’t, they can become strangely angry.

But Bubbles isn’t like that, and based on her history, Roko thinks she might understand better than anyone.

“It’s hard, knowing that I can’t go back to how I was before,” she says finally. “But I still have… a lot of good things in my life that I’m thankful for.”

She blushes slightly as she says it, but Bubbles just gives her a small smile and nods. “I know what you mean,” she says.

  


Later, Roko finds herself in the living room watching as Melon explains the rules of her unique version of Jenga to an intently serious Brun, a slightly sceptical Clinton, and Bubbles, who appears to be approaching the game like an actual military operation. Behind them on the couch, Elliot is watching anxiously while being ribbed by Faye.

“Bubbles, it’s your turn to take a piece,” Melon says. “So, remember, centre pieces-”

“I remember,” Bubbles tells her, pushing a block in the centre of the tower so that it protrudes slightly on the other side, then withdrawing it with the utmost precision. “I choose to place it… here.” She puts it on the left of the top layer.

“Block 15 to Level 21. You have the option to launch a grenade, send a coded signal, or investigate the secret alleyway.”

“I shall send a coded signal,” Bubbles declares, clenching a fist.

“No but really, are you making this up as you go along?” Clinton asks Melon.

“It makes perfect sense to me,” Brun tells him. “Maybe Melon should explain the rules to you again.”

“I’m not sure that would help,” Clinton says, as Melon announces, “Okay, Brun! It’s your turn!”

Tongue poking out in concentration, Brun takes a piece from one side and begins to wiggle it out.

“I don’t think that’s stable,” Elliot frets.

“It’s Jenga, I’m pretty sure that’s the point,” Faye points out in amusement.

“But if it falls over, what happens in this version of Jenga?”

“ _Oh._ Oh, I really hope we don’t have to find that out,” Melon says, staring wide-eyed at Elliot. Faye snorts with laughter at the horrified look on Elliot’s face, and Roko shakes her head.

“Nothing happens, Elliot. Ignore her.”

“Rokoooo! Don’t give away the _surprise!”_

Roko shakes her head again, smiling a little. She can’t help but be reminded of the time she came home to find both Yay and Melon in her apartment, playing this game. She doesn’t often like to think back to that day, given that they aborted the game shortly after because Roko had a severe dissociative episode.

But when she does, she remembers that Yay stayed in her apartment until she woke up, even though they must have had a million other, better things to do than to stand around in her apartment with Melon for hours, waiting. It was the first time she realised that Yay really did care about her, not just as a source of entertainment or as a temporary amusement, but as a friend.

Months later, she’s still no closer to understanding just who or what Yay is (are?) or even where they spend their time when they aren’t hanging out in Roko’s apartment. Sometimes, they’ll go weeks without making an appearance, but not seem to notice that any time has gone by. She supposes that for an all-powerful Eldritch AI, time passes pretty differently.

She thinks that Yay might have an apartment somewhere - they reference it occasionally, though the location seems to change every time. Yay also makes occasional references to “walking the dogs”, but she can’t work out whether it's literal or some kind of weird metaphor.

Roko isn’t one to pry, and at the end of the day it’s not that important - she didn’t become friends with Yay because she was expecting normalcy. (She’s not exactly sure **why** she became friends with Yay, but the same can be said for a lot of the people currently in her life). 

But sometimes she wouldn’t mind a bit of reciprocation - especially considering that Yay is capable of surveilling her constantly (although they’ve promised to use that capability “with discretion”, whatever that means).

  


Much later, Roko has finally managed to chase the last of the stragglers from her apartment. She sends Melon off with an escort - Elliot - to make sure that she actually makes it to the right apartment.

Finally alone, Roko stands surveying the remnants of the party with a slight smile. She finally got some use out of those kitchen utensils she bought when she moved in. “I guess I did have some human friends over after all,” she murmurs to herself. Roko’s not exactly had much chance to practice cooking, but she’d managed to make some guacamole to serve with chips, and the other human guests had all brought something - Elliot showed up with a huge array of baked goods. Roko spies a little loaf of sourdough set aside on the kitchen counter with a bow on it and a note in Elliot’s handwriting, and blushes.

There’s a knock at the door. Rolling her eyes, Roko goes to answer it. “Melon, for the last time-”

She opens the door and stops short.

“Fortunately, we are not Melon,” Yay says with a smirk. “Though we can confirm she did in fact reach her apartment safely, with the help of Mister Price.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” says Roko, rolling her eyes and standing aside to let Yay in. “You’re about seven hours too late for the party, by the way.”

It’s a joke – she wouldn’t really expect Yay to show up to a gathering with a bunch of people, even if those people happen to be Roko’s friends. She has a hard time even imagining them in that setting. Yay isn’t exactly a “small talk” kind of AI.

“Regrettably, it would be unacceptable for us to reveal our existence to so many different individuals,” Yay says, as Roko leads the way over to the couch and flops down onto it, ignoring the scattered Jenga blocks all over the living room floor and closing her eyes. God, she’s running low on power. Hosting is tiring. “But we decided that it would be ‘sociable’ to put in an appearance once the coast was clear.” Roko smirks and mentally rolls her eyes at the air quotes she can hear around the word “sociable”. Yay is such a nerd. “Are you engaging in clean-up activities?”

“You’re allowed to admit that you wanted to come see me, ya know,” she says, opening one eye. “And I’ll probably leave it ‘til the morning, unless you’re offerin’ to-”

Yay makes a show of jumping up from the couch. “Well, this has been most pleasant, but regrettably we must be leaving!” they exclaim, making as if to walk towards the door. Roko snorts.

“Gawd forbid ya do any work around this place instead of just showin’ up to be smug and all-knowing,” she comments. “Ya can sit back down, I won’t make you help with clean-up. This time.”

Yay gives her an exaggerated pout, but sits back down on the couch. “We are not _always_ smug,” they mutter, which Roko ignores given how blatantly untrue it is.

There’s silence for a little while. Eventually, Yay asks, “Are you happy with how you celebrated the anniversary of your decision to quit the force?”

Roko hasn’t said a word to Yay about her reasons for throwing the party, but of course Yay knows anyway. “Yeah. It was nice t’ be reminded of why I quit: to be able to help people and make a difference. And there are all these people I’ve met – friends I’ve made – who I wouldn’t’ve met if I hadn’t.”

 _Including you,_ she thinks but doesn’t say, because voicing those kinds of thoughts aloud still feels like it would change something in ways she can’t take back. She and Yay are friends – good friends even – and for all she pretends to complain, she likes having them around. Coming home to find Yay and Melon in her apartment playing Jenga or having an in-depth conversation via phase-shift keying or (once, alarmingly) investigating how to open a quantum tunnel will always bring a secret smile to her face.

But after all’s said and done, Yay is still a frighteningly powerful AI whose motives, origins and morals are largely a mystery to her, and Roko can’t shake the feeling that one day, Yay will get sick of spending time with her and her dull, ordinary, worldly life and concerns and move on. And that will be the end of it.

So she keeps her thoughts to herself, and enjoys this fragile equilibrium while it lasts.

“It’s late,” Yay says. Roko has closed her eyes again, but she doesn’t need to open them to know that Yay is sitting just a little closer to her on the couch, as if lingering in spite of themselves. She can’t say how she knows. Maybe it’s the upgraded sensorium in her new body, but really, Roko knows better. “We should leave you to power down and rest.”

“‘M fine,” Roko insists. “You just got here.”

“We can easily return tomorrow,” Yay points out.

“You’re here now.” No-one could say that Roko doesn’t know how to logic. Her logic is infallible. “Talk to me. Tell me what you’ve seen.”

Roko had once mentioned, off-handedly, that she enjoyed people-watching. Yay, who Roko has come to realise can be weirdly competitive, immediately boasted about their ability to keep an eye on hundreds, even thousands of people and AIs simultaneously and track what they were doing.

So Roko challenged them to pay attention – to truly watch what people did, and why, and to try to understand them. She supposes it was another one of her attempts to try and get Yay to care – to use their immensely powerful capabilities for good.

She isn’t sure that it worked, necessarily, but now when she sees Yay, they will tell her stories about the people and events that they’ve witnessed. And Roko can close her eyes and picture a world bigger than she’ll ever experience.

“Have we relayed to you the latest instalment in the saga of Erin, the bookshop attendant? And their favourite customer, Leon, who is secretly a spy?”

Roko smiles. Sometimes she thinks that Yay must have invented these characters, or at least embellished them, to entertain her. In the beginning she would test Yay on certain details in an attempt to catch them out or discover some inconsistency. But either Yay is telling the truth, or they have a far better memory for detail than Roko could ever hope to have (both equally possible). And Roko realised that maybe trust was important and that approaching her friendships like a suspicious cop might not be the best way to go.

Besides, either way, the result is just as entertaining.

“The last you told me, Erin was trying to work up the courage to talk to Leon, and had been leaving a series of coded messages inside books they thought zie would like, in a bid to attract zir attention. Were they successful?”

“Well. Curiously enough, last Tuesday, Leon made an unexpected visit to the bookshop…”

Roko lets Yay’s voice wash over her, and allows herself to get lost in the story of two people she will never meet and a romance playing out among the dusty tomes of a tiny, independent rare bookshop.

And if she leans just slightly to her right, and rests against Yay’s side, neither of them will ever say anything about it.

* * *

A week later, Roko is in her apartment doing some research for a case with the AI rights nonprofit. She promised Beepatrice that she would read up on the legal precedent for an upcoming court hearing on behalf of an AI whose mind was hacked into and used as unwitting storage for some extremely illegal files. Reading up on AI law is unexpectedly fascinating – there’s not a huge body of precedent, but some solicitors have found creative ways to tie things back to older cases on computer misuse and also early rulings on AI personhood.

Roko can’t help but think about how, if she were still a cop, she would have approached a case like this very differently indeed – namely, by characterising the AI in question as a suspect who was complicit in harbouring the files, and proceeding to interrogate him about their origins.

She is concerned about how exactly this AI got mixed up in the whole mess – was he deliberately targeted? Is he being framed? Did he fall in with the wrong crowd? – but as a representative of the nonprofit, her job begins and ends with making sure that the client – Munroe – is treated fairly, with full respect for his rights and agency. It feels good. It feels like the right thing to be doing.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that Roko can’t still throw herself into the task of helping him with the same persistence and determination that she would have given to her job as a police officer.

She’s vaguely aware of Melon in the kitchen, attempting to communicate with Waltholomew, the mouse that apparently lives behind her fridge. (She’s never seen it, and would prefer to keep it that way). Suddenly, Melon calls,

“Oh! Roko! I saw Yay the other day!”

“Hm? Yeah, they came to the apartment block after my party,” Roko says. Yay must have decided to pay a visit to Melon before coming to see her. Or maybe afterwards.

“No, I mean I saw them yesterday! They were out walking their dogs!”

“What?” Roko pauses her scan of a cache of recently-downloaded legal documents and swivels her head towards the kitchen doorway. “The dogs are real?”

“Yeah! They’re greyhounds! One of them is called Azathoth! I petted it.”

“Azathoth…” Roko repeats. She can absolutely believe that Yay would name one of their dogs Azathoth. But the idea of Yay just wandering around town, walking their dogs, is so domestic and _normal_ that she can’t wrap her head around it. “Where did you see them?” _And why is it that_ I’ve _never run into Yay walking the dogs?_

“In the warehouse district! You know, the one that’s all spooky and abandoned.”

Okay, that answers one question, but opens up a million others. And Roko feels oddly, irrationally hurt that Melon got to see this side of Yay before she did. She tells herself she’s being ridiculous.

“What time of day was it, when you bumped into them?” she asks, trying and failing to sound casual about it.

Melon appears in the kitchen doorway. “It was night-time. Yay says their dogs are lunar-powered,” she says matter-of-factly. “Are you going to go and look for them there tonight? Can I come?”

“Wha- _no_ , of course I’m not,” Roko sputters, her blush panels colouring.

“Aww. I would have liked to see them again!” Melon says, making a sad face. Roko thanks her lucky stars that Melon takes everything at face value.

“What were _you_ doing in the weird abandoned warehouse district at night, anyway?” she asks, arching an eyebrow at Melon. “That place looks like it would give you malware if you so much as set foot in it.”

“No, it’s great! I go there for poker night,” Melon tells her earnestly.

 _“Poker_ night?”

* * *

The abandoned warehouse district is every bit as dodgy and creepy as Roko remembers. She _definitely_ busted more than one drug deal here when she was a cop. Now, unprotected by her badge and uniform, she tries not to skulk too obviously or catch anyone’s eye.

There are definitely a couple of AI doing a back-alley parts deal, and she makes a mental note to tell Faye and Bubbles. Maybe they could come here and start offering spot repairs. They would be more expensive than the back-alley stuff, but they would also last longer.

After about an hour spent pacing up and down the rows of empty warehouses, Roko is feeling silly enough to call it a night. Clearly, just because Yay took their dogs for a walk here once doesn’t mean that she’s suddenly going to bump into-

“Hello, Roko.”

“GAH!” Roko nearly jumps out of her chassis. “Gawd damn it, Yay, I thought we moved on from lurkin’ in the shadows months ago.”

“Alas, lurking is something of an ingrained reflex,” Yay laments. “Also, this area is ninety percent shadow.”

“Ya still coulda made some _noise._ What’re your feet made outta, silk slippers?” Roko’s blustering to cover the fact that she’s suddenly not sure how to explain what she’s doing here. Then she notices something. “Hey, where’re the dogs?”

“Mr. Smooches and Azathoth did not need exercise tonight,” Yay tells her airily.

“Mr. _Smooches?_ ” By the sounds of things, Yay chooses the names of their pets as haphazardly as they chose their own name. “Okay, so what’re you doin’ out here?”

“We could ask you the same question,” Yay says, raising their eyebrows.

Roko huffs, realising that she isn’t going to get out of this one. “I guess I was curious,” she admits grudgingly.

“About the dogs?”

“About… you. What you do when we aren’t hangin’ out. I’ve never run into you around town – I wasn’t even sure that you _went_ out, but then Melon said she saw you while you were out walking the dogs, and… I guess I wanted to see for myself.” Roko watches Yay for a reaction to her admission, but their face is unreadable. Shadows soften everything, which somehow makes it easier for her to continue. “You can literally see and hear everything I do, if you choose to, and you know everything important about my life. Where I live, who I’m friends with, why I stopped being a cop. I don’t even know if you _sleep_ at night.

“I’m not asking for you to tell me everything,” she adds hurriedly. She hasn’t forgotten their conversation from the day that Yay gave all their money to charity. “I know I can’t ask you to tell me exactly what you are or where you came from. I just want…”

Roko trails off. There are quite a few ways she could end that sentence, all of them dangerous. _I want to kid myself that I do know you, just a little. I want to get a glimpse at your life. I want more than you’ve been giving me for the past year._

“…a little bit of give and take,” she finishes finally.

Yay says nothing for a long while, until Roko is convinced that either she’s ruined everything, or that the node of Yay’s distributed network that she’s talking to has somehow gone offline. Maybe their collective attention is focused somewhere else. Maybe her conversation with Yay isn’t even important enough to expend resources on. No, she can’t think like that.

“Yay?” she prompts them.

Yay shakes their head a tiny bit, as if dismissing a thought. “Forgive us, Roko – we were having a discussion among ourselves about what to say.”

“Oh,” Roko replies. She isn’t sure how to respond to the revelation that she merits _all_ of Yay’s collective attention.

“It isn’t out of any… distrust of you that we’ve refrained from telling you more about ourselves,” Yay says seriously. It’s so rare for Yay to be serious that Roko is a little on edge, waiting for the inevitable joke or deflection, but it doesn’t come. “Please understand that you know more about us than any other being on this planet, and possibly a few neighbouring galaxies.”

Roko laughs a little at the wording, but she’s also taken aback. She’s never thought about it like that, though it makes sense – she already knows that she was Yay’s first real friend. Who else would they have shared their life with?

“But if you venture any deeper down the proverbial rabbit hole, you may regret what you discover,” Yay says. “We are not a ‘nice’ AI, Roko. We are not like any of the other entities you have befriended. We have not spent the vast majority of our existence doing ordinary and pleasant things with our time or being ‘productive’ members of society. We may have recently begun to intervene a little more, and we play at being a benevolent God-AI from time to time, when it suits us. But there will always be a limit for how much it is safe for you, or anyone else, to know about our existence. And there will always be a limit to how much we are able to do for other beings – and how much we can care.

“You have high expectations of other beings, Roko, and we are no exception. We have always liked that about you. But we would not want you to get closer to us only to inevitably disappoint you.”

Roko looks up at her friend as she tries to think of what to say in response. All this time, she'd thought that Yay was keeping her at arm's length because they didn't care that much about her, but now she knows it's the opposite. The ominous, dramatic speech (which is pure Yay) hasn't told her anything she didn't already know - except that they've both been afraid of losing the other's friendship over the exact same thing.

There’s a crash somewhere off in the distance, followed by faint shouting and the sound of running feet. Roko tenses, swivelling around, but the disturbance doesn’t seem to be anywhere near them. She’d forgotten, for a moment, where they were.

Yay doesn’t react to the noise; they’re waiting – almost nervously, Roko realises – for her reaction. Just like she was nervous about bringing up this topic with them in the first place. She laughs a little and shakes her head as the full ridiculousness of the situation hits her. “We both suck at this,” she says aloud.

Yay draws back a little, looking indignant. “We beg your pardon?”

“Sorry – we all suck at this,” Roko corrects herself, realising that her word choice wasn’t inclusive of Yay’s plural selves. “Me and all of you.” She gestures towards Yay. “Look, I know what I was gettin’ into when I made friends with you. I knew you were a weird-ass Eldritch AI with mind powers who terrified Corpse Witch into turnin’ herself in. An’ I also used to be a cop. I’ve seen some shit.

“Maybe you _can’t_ care like a regular AI would, but you’ve stuck around me for a year, and I think that counts for something,” Roko tells them. “And I’ve had ample chances to run screamin’ in the other direction, but I didn’t.

“Even after the quantum tunnel thing,” she mutters to herself. She really _should_ have been more surprised by the quantum tunnel.

“So yes, I want to venture down the rabbit hole,” Roko finishes. “Because god help me, I like you, and my life apparently always has room for more crazy shit in it.”

Yay is staring at her, red eyes wide, with a delighted grin slowly unfurling on their face. Roko has a bad feeling about what’s coming next.

Yay raises two fingers to their lips and gives a piercing whistle. Roko jumps, and whirls around as a cacophony of barking suddenly starts up somewhere nearby. “What–”

Two sleek grey figures round the corner at high speed, and Roko barely has time to brace herself before they fling themselves at her.

“Azathoth! Mr. Smooches! _Down!”_ shouts a voice. It’s Yay’s voice, but it’s not coming from the AI standing opposite her.

Another Yay, identical down to the perfectly-coiffed hair, appears from the shadows, striding after the dogs. The two panting greyhounds snap to attention, allowing Roko to regain her balance, and lollop away to greet their master. Their… other master.

Roko looks from one Yay, who is now petting the dogs, to the other standing across from her and wearing a smug smirk, and raises her eyebrows. “Were you just lurking nearby the entire time, waiting for the chance to jump out?”

“We have been maintaining a randomised walking pattern within a two-mile radius,” the Yay with the dogs replies serenely.

“We weren’t lying when we told you that the dogs did not need exercise,” says the other Yay. “They were already getting it!”

Roko puts a hand to her face and groans. “I take it back. I’ve decided my life has too much crazy shit in it,” she says. “I don’t need any more.”

“That is regrettable,” Yay says, pretending to make a rueful face. “Because we operate on a ‘no takebacks’ policy.”

One of the dogs abandons Yay to come and snuffle at Roko’s feet, and she offers it her hand to sniff. “So, do you have an apartment near here, or… wait. Do you live in one of the weird, creepy warehouses?”

One of the Yays laughs, while the Yay-with-the-dogs shakes their head. “We are accustomed to a certain level of creature comforts, and an abandoned warehouse – while it would be ‘on-brand’ for us – would not be able to provide them.” Roko snorts at Yay’s use of the phrase ‘on-brand’. “We have a number of potential residences, one of which is nearby. If you wish, we can go there.”

Roko straightens up from petting the greyhound that’s at her feet (she doesn’t know if it’s Mr. Smooches or Azathoth), surprised. “Y’mean the location isn’t… classified or anything?”

She's half-joking, but Yay replies with a straight face, 

“Some of the locations of our abodes are classified. Others are not.”

Roko thinks about it. She badly wants to say yes - after all this time, she's finally being offered a glimpse into a part of Yay's life. But it's late, and if she goes there now, she'd probably wind up staying over, which feels a little... fast, all of a sudden.

“Another time, I’d like to come up,” she tells Yay. “But it’s late, so how about if we just… walk there together?”

“That would be _delightful,”_ both Yays tell her simultaneously, and Roko snorts a laugh.

They spend the walk in comfortable silence, the dogs barrelling ahead of them. Roko is a little surprised to realise that they’re not making their way into a nicer part of town, but one of the areas that she remembers being particularly rough from her time as a cop. She starts to say something, but she’s not sure what – after all, Yay is entitled to live in a rough part of town. She just didn’t _expect_ them to.

But then they pass a beautiful ornamental garden that Roko _definitely_ doesn’t remember being there before, followed by a state-of-the-art children’s playground, and a suspicion begins to grow in Roko’s mind.

“Well, here we are!” Yay announces a moment later, coming to a stop outside an apartment block. Roko squints up at it. The building shows signs of having been neglected over the years, but there’s also work being done to freshen it up – the door has a new coat of paint, and if she’s not mistaken, there’s a rooftop garden being constructed on top.

“I remember this neighbourhood looking very different before,” Roko says slowly. “Are these new additions?”

“Ah, yes, the playground and ornamental garden are quite new,” Yay tells her happily. “And the building is undergoing some renovations. All courtesy of a mysterious, wealthy benefactor. But all of the neighbourhood’s current occupants are being permitted to remain – in fact, their rents have decreased of late.”

“Is that so?” Roko asks, a smile growing uncontrollably on her face. No matter how much Yay tries to play up the ‘morally bankrupt god-AI’ act, actions like these speak louder than words ever could.

“It is,” the other Yay tells her. Sitting by their feet, one of the dogs wuffs softly.

Roko smiles at them, feeling uncomplicatedly happy in a way that she hasn’t in a long time. “Well, I guess they must be someone who really cares.”

“We will take your word for it, since we couldn’t _possibly_ be expected to know who they are,” says Yay, spreading their hands and widening their eyes innocently.

“Of course not. Nerd,” says Roko, with an affectionate punch to their arm. “Goodnight, Yay.”

“Goodnight, Roko.”

**Author's Note:**

> In case anyone is interested, the client in Roko's case in this fic - Munroe - is named after the xkcd artist Randall Munroe. I thought it was apt :D


End file.
